I am an assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Maastricht University and member of the Maastricht University Science, Technology and Society research group (MUSTS). My academic work combines historical and STS-methods to study the impact of new media technologies on cognitive science, behavioural science and medicine since the mid-20th century. My monograph “Brainmedia: One Hundred Years of Performing Live Brains, 1920-2020,” was published by Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2022. In this book I examine past and present ways in which scientists, science educators, and artists use new media to conceptualize, examine and demonstrate the “brain at work” (see link).
My current research projects are focused on the history of artificial intelligence in clinical decision making (as part of an NWO-funded project titled “RAIDIO” 2020-2025) and practices of data ethics and data governance in new infrastructures for sharing health data (as part of an EU-funded project titled “STRONG-AYA” 2022-2027). For RAIDIO, I published about dreams of automating x-ray reading in the 1950s as part of the Mellon-Sawyer study group on Histories of Artificial Intelligence at Cambridge University (2021). I also wrote about lay and patients’ perceptions of AI in medicine, as well as the ethics and promises of synthetic data.
Previously, I was an affiliated researcher at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, TU Berlin (2019), working among other things on a special issue about new critical approaches to sex/gender neuroscience. At the University of Amsterdam (starting in 2012), I co-initiated the interdisciplinary “Neurocultures” research group for research at the crossroads of the humanities, social sciences and neurosciences, which culminated in the edited volume “Worlding the Brain: Neurocentrism, Cognition and the Challenge of the Arts and the Humanities” (2023), co-edited with Stephan Besser. In 2020 I defended my PhD-dissertation at the University of Amsterdam (winner of the ASCA Best Dissertation award). I was a visiting fellow at the Visual and Environmental Studies department of Harvard University.
I am also an enthusiastic initiator of exchanges between artists and scientists. Between 2020 -2022 I was a program developer and teacher for the (new) MA program “F for Fact,” at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam, a program in which artists work in the borderlands between fact and fiction. Between 2017 and 2019, I was the first program coordinator of the Amsterdam Research Institute of the Arts and Sciences (ARIAS), a platform that fosters collaborative research by artists and academic researchers. In this position, I initiated the ‘Artists & Archivists’ meet-ups in collaboration with the International Institute for Social History and the Meertens Institute. I have worked as a curator, researcher, teacher and organizer for several cultural institutions, including the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague), BAK, Basis voor Actuele Kunst (Utrecht), and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution (Amsterdam). I continue to advocate for diverse forms of art-science exchange at my home university as a member of the steering committee of MERIAN (the Maastricht university Experimental Research In And through the Arts Network).
Bio Dr. Flora Lysen, 2025
photo: Alena Schmick